Tag Archives: speech

“Freud’s Radical Talking” by Benjamin Y. Fong—Interesting NY Times essay from last year on the function of speech in the “talking cure”:

“From an outside perspective, the [psychoanalytic] conversation is pointless. And indeed, most of the time it appears to be a waste. But in its disjunction with routine human interaction, it opens a space for our knotted interiors, so used to “having a point,” to slowly unravel. As each piece flakes off, it is examined and seen in relation to other pieces. After a long while, we gain what might be called, to borrow a term from Martin Heidegger, a “free relation” to these parts of ourselves and our world, such that the unmovable density they once comprised becomes pliable and navigable. Some key pieces appear and others vanish, but the puzzle is never complete. The aim of the conversation, however, is not completion, which short of death itself is an illusion, but the ability to change. This change involves neither the victory of the secondary process nor the liberation of the primary process but rather the opening of lines of communication between them.”